gifting

 

I think often about the crisis of creating. As a boy I used to tell people I want to be a writer. I would write away in random notebooks, entire worlds of my own creation that were rarely revisited for a second sitting. I did not particularly want anyone to read them. My way of guarding against being seen was to not be too protective of the notebooks; nobody snooped through the stuff that was deliberately made to look carelessly strewn around. I think this is why I lost them too; when I left the house, no one knew all those volumes meant something to me. I have adopted this into my life in more meaningful ways than I realise. I have been told I am a difficult person to buy gifts for. It makes  sense to me; I find it difficult to let what I hold dear be known. A friend who was trying to be cheeky once said that I liked moving all the time because I was comfortable loving people from afar. Not that the sentiment was without truth entirely, but I think it would be even more accurate to say I prefer being loved from afar. Last night, I found myself rooting for and disappointed by Argentina’s defeat more intensely than I expected. The realisation that I would never watch the greatest player of all time ever again felt a piece of my life ending forever. I don’t think I could express that to anyone without them expressing a measure of surprise. It is easier to be loved from afar; you let your loved ones create image of you that you have to live up to. You try to perform to that standard, and relieve yourself of the responsibility of a real relationship. Everyone likes you, and as my sister once told me accusatorily, you get everyone to think you are one of them. So I watch my football games with agendas no one hears about and I have engagements with art that no one is told about. When I look at other people I wonder how many storylines they live that will die with them. They can’t all be comfortable being known.

White Pele

 

Every time the World Cup rolls around, I look back at the last one to get a sense of how much life has changed. The last one was three and a half years ago; not the usual lngth of time. In football terms, not too much has changed. Messi is still incredible, Ronaldo is still standing in the way of a really talented team’s success, United are still a waste of time, Arsenal continue chasing a European trophy, and Haaland is still a robot. My life could not have had a more eventful three-and-a-half-year period. I watched every single game of the Qatar World Cup, partly because I was aware that it would almost certainly never be possible again, and partly because the world’s game really is one of the few things I just cannot get enough of. Ronaldo had just given an explosive crybaby interview to Piers Morgan that made his exceptionally poor run even more enjoyable than usual.

I watched the 2018 World Cup Final at auditorium on the first day of law school; I remember thinking at the time that the degree was going to be so long that I might even watch the next World Cup in that place (which I did). I watched the 2022 World Cup Final in a Shisha bar in Kuwait, with a number of my friends whom I had not seen for years. When this World Cup opened, I watched it with a group of strangers at a summer school on a Greek island. In the gap between these two World Cups, I finished my LLB, LLM, and have just started a PhD. I have moved house more than one a year in that period, and moved countries almost once a year. A move to Europe, a return, and another move. Enough time to fall out of football and begin falling back in again.  

The stock taking happens every World Cup. Football loses more of its soul in each edition. It feels like the sticky mess of a trying to eat a piece of chocolate that really should have been in the fridge first. It is sweet, tastes like you were promised, and you still wish you had not opened it. I can have a moderate expectation that I will still be here when 2030 rolls around, and that Germany will probably still be ass. In that way, it is similar to that auditorium where I watched Mbappe announce himself to the world; it feels like the start of something.